The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago this week, was a bright torch of the Enlightenment. So was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, also published 250 years ago this year. But for me the most momentous happening in 1776 was the inauguration of James Watt’s first practical steam engine.Arguably, political economy (which later fractured into various social sciences) might have emerged to explain human action, not (despite the best efforts of the Men of System) to be an instruction manual.
We have the industrial revolution backwards. We tend to think that clever people in powdered wigs came up with ideas – democracy, free enterprise, stock markets, science, intellectual property – that enabled men with dirty fingernails to set about changing the world. But I think it was more that the fingernail fellows made the wig wearers possible. Smith’s division of labour and Jefferson’s democracy were all very well. But Thomas Newcomen and Watt mattered more. Thermodynamics – the science of heat and work – was invented to explain steam engines, not vice versa.
For the miracles of emergence to work, though, don't the institutions governing the relationship of citizen with state have to be biased toward freedom?
The great flywheel of positive feedback began delivering higher living standards not just for the rich but for the poor too. Previous civilisations in ancient India, China, Greece, Rome, Arabia, Italy, the Netherlands, had made the rich richer but had done little to help the poorest. This one was different - thanks almost entirely to coal, then oil and gas. As John Constable, the energy analyst, puts it, the economy is a thermodynamic machine: it takes random arrangements of atoms and turns them into improbable, useful forms.It's when the Men of System cloak themselves in Protecting Mother Nature, though, that the "great flywheel of positive feedback" gets jammed. "Britain’s pursuit of high energy costs is a reckless catastrophe."
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